Twice already we’ve shovelled the driveway, the front steps, and the back deck. We’ll do it again before bed. We’ll do it again in the morning.

I can hear the snowplows scraping down the street every half hour. I love being inside my snug house and hearing that sound. They’ll be plowing straight through tomorrow afternoon. Twenty-eight hours of shoving snow around! God bless the plow guys.

It was the perfect night for making dinner in a Pyrex snowflake casserole dish. So I did.

I started with a great recipe from Cook’s Illustrated for chicken and rice in a creamy sauce with carrots and peas. But we didn’t have any chicken and we didn’t have any milk, and I wasn’t about to make a supermarket run in 15 inches of snow. Not even for milk.

So I substituted sausage and lots of chicken broth, and threw in some mushrooms that needed to be used up. There’s a nice crispy breadcrumb and parmesan topping to finish it off.

Sorry no recipe. I basically got the inspiration from Cook’s and then winged it.

But it looked nice when it came out of the oven, and there isn’t much left so it can’t have tasted too badly.

Pyrex made the white-snowflakes-on-turquoise casserole dish as early as 1956 or 1957. It was also made in the reverse color scheme, turquoise snowflakes on a white dish. And in a dramatic charcoal and white too.

That’s a plain cotton turquoise tablecloth on the table. I didn’t iron it. Because I’m lazy, that’s why. It matches the snowflake Pyrex!

And behind the Pyrex you can see a vintage aluminum double candlestick. It’s one of a pair I nabbed earlier this week on an epic thrift day with Janeray. We might need the candles if the power goes out.